Tuesday, 15 April 2014

Lords of Olympus: Unlimiting Bad Luck

Back in the old day when I was playing Amber, I was always kind of
wary about just how much “bad stuff” my players could be allowed to
take. My feeling was that it might be too easy to abuse this; you could
end up with parties full of ‘bad stuff’ people, and it might be very
hard to effectively judge the differences between, say -20 and -50 bad
stuff.

Over time, however, I started loosening up on that. I took some sage
advice from Erick Wujcik: that its always more interesting to let the
players hoist themselves on their own petards. And when you consider
“stuff” as a “bell curve”, as (just like every other attribute) a
COMPARATIVE value, where just how lucky or unlucky a score is depends
somewhat on the other players and their scores, it suddenly started to
feel a lot easier for me to be able to quickly judge what was really
meritorious of misfortune.

With the “luck” ability in Lords of Olympus, these principles are
kept in place. Of course, bad luck is always bad, and good luck is
always good. It doesn’t matter if everyone else has way more good luck
than you, or way less bad luck than you, its still not going to move you
to that other shore in terms of actual effect. And likewise, anyone
who has more than about +20 luck or worse than -20 luck will still be a
very extreme case, even if everyone else in the group is in the same
boat.

But aside from those guidelines, what matters after that is
how they are in comparison to the overall spread of the group’s luck.

To quote the book:Rather than placing hard limits on Luck, the
gamemaster should inform a character with really bad luck that he can
and will make life miserable for him. Likewise, to counter players
hoarding Luck, the gamemaster should explain that it is less-influential
than powers or abilities.

If you’ve done that, and thus covered your bases, you shouldn’t be
afraid of throwing the bad-luck book at a player who has gotten him or
herself into serious points-debt. They’re literally asking for it.
And of course, some of the best drama can come out of presenting
misfortune in an interesting and clever way; its better to provide bad
luck that increases the sense of challenge and difficulty for the
player, rather than just screws the player over irreparably.

A lot of the best roleplaying I’ve seen in diceless games has come
out of players dealing with their character’s abysmal luck. And this is
especially appropriate in Lords of Olympus; they don't call them “Greek
Tragedies” for nothing, you know.